Zombie Hunter: F

In a near-future post-apocalyptic wasteland, zombies with varying degrees of intelligence roam the earth feasting on the flesh of the living. Unfortunately, they don’t feast on our rugged anti-hero protagonist, Hunter, a guy with a perpetual 5 o’clock shadow and forced-as-fuck gritty voice. He must have gone to Michael Biehn’s Acting Academy.

If you like voice-overs where some loser is trying as hard as he can to sound tough, maybe you should stop reading this now and just go buy this movie. Hunter can’t stop talking about himself. For every fact he narrates about zombies, he has to follow it up with an annoying fact about himself to remind the audience of what an anti-hero nomad he is. “Some of the zombies are smart” is followed by “I love tequila.” “It all started with this street drug called Natas” is followed by “I can’t let go of the past.” You are expected to sit through this while he mashes along dirt roads in a Camero, squinting like Paul Walker, while a soundtrack of emotional alt-rock blares.

I swear to God I’m not making this up: The fucking alt-rock and dirt roads actually go away for a minute… so he can run over a zombie with his Camero and… as he hits the windshield wipers… the alt-rock blares and he peels out on another dirt road.

While I could write a fucking thesis about why Hunter sucks as a character, and the over-use of dirt roads and alt-rock, I need to focus on the movie’s style/aesthetic as a whole. This film tries SO HARD to emulate a neo-Grindhouse (like from Death-Proof and Machete) feel and it fails SO FUCKING BADLY. There’s artificial grit and blips arbitrarily added to a bunch of the cinematography. Sometimes a whip sound-effect happens and large block letters pop up on the screen to show the name of a character to the audience. “CRACK! – HUNTER.”  “CRACK! – FAST LANE DEBBIE.” There are two-dimensional female characters in jean shorts. All the contrast is cranked like your ex-girlfriend’s Instagram filter. The execution of EVERY EVENT is so fucking corny; the whole film has the timing of a kid’s cereal commercial.

They got Trejo to show up in the movie, and they feature him prominently on the cover art, but their budget only allowed him to deliver a handful of sentences and do some disappointing slow-motion shirtless axe-wielding.

I recommend this movie for dirt road enthusiasts.